Abstract

We introduce an algorithm for high-quality, interactive light field rendering from only a small number of input images with dense depth information. The algorithm bridges the gap between image warping and interpolation from image databases, which represent the two major approaches in image based rendering. By warping and blending only the necessary parts of each reference image, we are able to generate a single view-corrected texture for every output frame at interactive rates. In contrast to previous light field rendering approaches, our warping-based algorithm is able to fully exploit per-pixel depth information in order to depth-correct the light field samples with maximum accuracy. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is nearly independent of the number of stored reference images and of the final screen resolution. It performs with only small overhead and very few visible artifacts. We demonstrate the visual fidelity as well as the performance of our method through various examples.